I wish straightening out the borders--both literally and figuratively--were an option over there. The border with Pakistan is a hopelessly convoluted line that invites constant accusations of incursions. And the borders are somewhat arbitrary to begin with, dividing populations in half in some cases.

Friedman has been flamboyantly wrong so often that he is now a parody of a columnist. He once predicted tha the internet would drive Amazon out of business because anybody could sell books out of their home.

In Afghanistan, we--the wealthiset and most powerful nation in the history of the world--are acting to save our own future, not to take care of an orphan child. what a foool he is.

I have said it before:Tom Friedman is no thinker but a repeater of others thoughts, and his columns are representations of the thoughts of the last few people he has spoken with.His writing style is clumsy, unfocused, and all too much alarmist.How this joker became a multi millionaire with one of the nicest spreads in Washington DC speaks to me the greatness of America.

Tom F is never as funny as when he makes sillier comparisons than MoDo.

Maybe someone in his "Arab Street" should help finance the adoption of this baby!

Jason: I think that you have the answer: The obsession with Sarah P.

It's like the old joke of the shrink showing the naughty lady ink blots & asking what they mean to her. When she keeps answering "sex", the shrink stops & she says "everything reminds me of sex. So with the NYT & Palin.

BTW, the NYT will now have 11 fact checkers vet your Palin conclusion.

Also BTW, can we describe the MSM’s fact checking every Palin quote & event as “Palintology”?I don’t know if anybody has said something like this neologism before I just did; if so, I apologize for unconscious parallelism.

Lucid - In Afghanistan, we--the wealthiset and most powerful nation in the history of the world--are acting to save our own future, not to take care of an orphan child. what a foool he is.

No, I would argue that it is the people that think we can have endless war costing 100 billion per "rescue project nation" in a series of unstable Islamoid countries who are the fools. Why exactly MUST we intervene and occupy Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan *shudder*, Iran, Lebanon, Syria? Because a few thousand "Evildoers" may take up residence there and the price to block that is soldiers that cost a million dollars a year to field?

When Bush laid out his idiot reasoning of endless preemptive wars to prevent "another 9/11"..even he never imagined 30-year long nation-building wars. And he imagined it could all happen forever with China picking up the loan and while he could reward Americans with more and deeper tax cuts..and no sacrifice.(And without going after where 95% of the work and effort into 9/11 happened - Germany, the UAE, and the USA)

Yeah, the analogy is fairly apt - unemployed wastrel couple decides to venture out and get a 30-year commitment to a special needs baby completely outside what should be their vital needs as a couple..

Tom Friedman, Joe Biden, and Obama should all go out for beers sometime and dish about how dumb Sarah Palin is. Because, clearly, they're all much smarter. Much. I mean, she really deserves ridicule. Whereas they are virtual founts of wisdom. Or something.

Why are analogies so irresistible in argument? Attempting to make an issue clearer by pretending it is something else completely different is mildly insane. You have to ignore the details of both the target and the analogy in order to even get it. Yet we can't resist.

A special needs child is worth adopting even if you can't afford it. Of course you could just let it run in the streets learning to be a criminal and eventually breaking into your house some night to rape you with nuclear weapons.

Special needs isn't all that much more expensive than a normal child, but it is more time consuming. Being unemployed actually helps, since a parent needs to be around more often.

I see what he's trying to say, but the analogy is poor.

What he is saying may be correct. It's almost impossible to pull the poorest countries out of their mess. Doing so during a war is even harder. Why we should be doing so at all is a legitimate question.

I think Tiny Tom really feels like he's an unemployed couple who just went out and aborted a special needs baby, cause he's a died in the wool liberal and most liberals would never let a special needs baby go to term, hence their pathological hatred of Sarah Palin who CHOSE to carry such a baby to term. How horrid. Could you imagine not doing everything to have a perfect baby, and if that means scrambling a few eggs (abortion) well the ends justify the means.